Go Go Kare

Japanese Curry, Christmas Lights 
Understanding Ichi-go-Ichi-e 

    Something in my gut told me not to leave the bigger baby shower gifts behind, so I made a few trips to my truck in the parking garage and loaded everything up. My coworkers had thrown me an excellent baby shower and we feasted on Hawaiian BBQ to celebrate. I took one last look at my desk, conducting a mental inventory to make sure nothing was forgotten for the day. I grabbed my thermos and started saying good night to everyone just like all the days before that one. I didn’t know it, but that would be the last time I set foot inside of SpaceX. That was 640 days ago. That night, in the produce aisle at a grocery store, with a bag of salad in my hand, my wife called my name and when I turned to her she told me her water just broke. I calmly put the salad back on the shelf. I never said goodbye to my friends at work. There is a tradition at SpaceX that when someone on the team leaves, they receive a giant framed poster of Falcon 9 with messages from coworkers written all over it in sharpie. After work, everyone goes to the nearest brewery and gets trashed, eats tacos, and plays drunk ping pong while telling stories of their time there. I worked at SpaceX for 7 years, had 4 different roles across 6 departments and befriended everyone down to the janitors. Nobody knew that would be my last day there, hell, I didn’t know that would be my last day there. I never got that giant framed poster to hang on my wall, and so much time has passed since then, I probably never will. 
    Endings can be brutal when delivered unexpectedly. We’ve been conditioned through the media to expect endings to be “epic” and “happy”. When in reality endings are anything but that. Much of this emotional pain comes in part due to the attachments we have to those chapters of our lives. Now I’m not talking about losing your favorite shirt or misplacing your cufflinks. I’m talking about spending years in a position where you build relationships and bonds over long nights and working as a team to accomplish a bigger goal. You never expect the rug to be pulled out from under you so quickly. To be thrown into something new without first putting your past to rest requires mental gymnastics beyond anything I’ve ever learned before.

    I was mulling this over in my brain while on a walk with Chamaca during a brief break in the rain. We walked by a small restaurant squished next to a bar and I smelled something savory in the air. I quickly stopped and took a look at the menu in the window. Japanese Curry. There is nothing, nothing like eating Japanese curry when it’s cold outside. With Chamaca’s nap time fast approaching, I made a mental note to order from Go Go Kare when I got home. After I laid Chamaca down for her nap, I put in my order and then cracked open a tall can of Kirin Ichiban as I waited for my food to arrive. I normally like to share these experiences with Chamaca but today I was feeling kind of sad and decided I would eat this by myself. 

     $15 gives you a healthy portion of short grain white rice, pickled radish and meat of your choice. I ordered both a Tonkatsu (breaded pork cutlet) and a Chicken Karaage with intent to save some Tonkatsu leftovers for my wife and Chamaca. Off the bat, I must say the Chicken Karaage is tender and delicious. I tried to decipher the marinade but all I could pull from it was some curry, ginger, coriander and tumeric? Either way, it was some of the best Chicken Karaage I’ve ever had.The curry itself is seasoned nicely and has a bit of spice even at its mildest, which I really enjoyed because I felt like whoever made it understood the subtle art of restraint. The carrots and potatoes in the curry were also cooked excellently as they still had some bite to them and weren’t mushy. I ate all of this sitting in our kitchen, looking out of the window watching the lemon tree in the backyard do a little dance with the rain and wind. I drained the last of my beer and felt at peace. By the time you read this, Go Go Kare will have shut their doors and gone out of business. Their last day of operations was December 22, 2024, as they decided not to renew their lease for 2025. They had been open for 3 months, and I didn’t find them until their last week of business. Another sad ending. 

     In the summer of 2016 I met a guy at work we will call Adam Charleston. Adam was extremely intelligent, a bit of a smart ass, and had spent years in the military stationed in Japan. He would tell me stories of taking the train into different parts of the city and eating everything Japan would put in front of him. When he asked me if I had ever had Japanese Curry and I said no, he suggested we get the whole team together and go out for lunch one day. We did this a few times, and each time a party of 20 would roll into the restaurant, all of us in SpaceX hoodies and hats, ordering beers and curry and enjoying each others company. I’m sure the employees at CoCo Ichibanya would take one look at us and think to themselves, “here come these rowdy bastards again.” 

We didn’t care, we tipped 30% so bite us. 

    There is a phrase in Japanese language I’ve been learning to embrace: Ichi-go,Ichi-e which roughly translates into “one time, one meeting”. I meditate on this after Chamaca throws her plate of food off her tray and I clean sticky rice and small bits of cucumber and tomato from the laminate floors. Rice streaking and creating a glutinous film on the floor that is going to take some serious elbow grease to clean up. If you look at life as a series of moments strung together in a certain order, endings don’t seem so bad. Like Christmas lights strung across a house, all of them slowly blinking with different intensity. Endings still hurt, as they always will, but you have to focus on the next bulb to illuminate. Chamaca will not always be a toddler, restaurants will always close, life will continue moving, regardless if you want it to or not. But the Japanese have the right idea. One time, one meeting, the uniqueness of a moment or gathering. I will never eat Japanese Curry with those same SpaceX employees again. I will never get my framed poster with inspirational messages written on it by some of my best colleagues. I will never be at that same time, meeting with those same people. So I remind myself to embrace these moments, to calm down and remember that Chamaca will grow up one day and we’ll laugh about these times. I remind myself that one day I will go back to work, and who knows what it will be. I’ve had so many different jobs, it’s Factotum now. 

My dad once said to me, “Today is the future we all thought about yesterday.” 

Contemplate this. 

Go Go Kare

1353 Taraval St, San Francisco, CA 94116